Toggl is an intuitive and easy-to-use service that gives you exactly the tools you need for tracking time spent on tasks. It's our favorite free time-tracking tool for freelancers.

Bottom Line

Toggl is an intuitive time-tracking app with a generous free tier of service, as well as business analysis features for paying customers. It runs in the browser or as a browser extension, and there are mobile apps for tracking time on the go. Toggl is ideal for freelancers and small businesses, and it can also work well for larger teams as long as they are in the market for an app that specifically tracks time spent working, without offering other employee-monitoring services. Toggl is our Editors' Choice for free time-tracking tools for freelancers, though it offers good paid plans, as well. If you're willing to pay, however, Harvest is our top choice.

Pricing and Plans

Toggl offers four tiers of service. The first level is free, and it's generous in that it offers all the basic features and doesn't put any tight restrictions on what you can do with it. The paid plans cost $10, $20, and $59 per person per month for Starter, Premium, and Enterprise, respectively. For all the paid plans, you get a discount if you pay annually instead of monthly.

With the free plan, you get all the core time-tracking tools, idle detection, the ability to edit time tracked, tags, the ability to work offline, weekly reports, and the ability to create as many projects and clients as you need. You also get a few team-management features, including the ability to manage up to five teams. Several integrations are supported (Asana, Basecamp, Freshbooks, Github, Teamweek), although iCal is not. You also miss out on tracking reminders.

Starter members get everything that Free members get, plus billable rates, project time estimates, alerts for estimates, tasks, project dashboards, support to integrate with iCal, and several other additions.

Premium members get everything that Starter members get, plus one additional feature that they can choose from a list of seven. Without going into great detail about each option, they essentially allow you to get tracking reminders, get priority support, or have more control over team management or reports. You can switch your extra feature once per month.

Enterprise members get everything mentioned so far, but with all seven of the add-on options for Premium members.

Comparison Pricing

Compared with other time-tracking and reporting tools, Toggl's prices are within reason but on the expensive side considering what you get. Harvest, a main competitor to Toggl, charges a little more than Toggl's Premium plan, but it includes invoicing and scheduling tools, which Toggl doesn't have.

Another app called Freelancy charges just one flat fee, $29.90, for lifetime use. Freelancy runs either in the browser or on desktop, but only if you're a Mac user. It offers no apps for Windows or Linux. Another tool that's suitable for freelancers and micro-businesses, called TopTracker, is entirely free to use, although it doesn't have as many features as Toggl's paid service.

RescueTime, which sometimes gets compared to Toggl, is a different type of time-tracking app. RescueTime tracks all the time you spend in different apps and websites, but it doesn't have a timer you can use to start and stop timing a specific task. If while working on a task, you end up using multiple apps and websites, RescueTime won't help you bill a client easily for the total time spent completing the work. But RescueTime can give you wonderfully detailed reports about how you typically spend your working hours. It's an excellent way to track your productivity.

Hubstaff and TSheets both cost less, although they are more for tracking employees, such as having them clock in and out of work, than running a very small business and collaborating with a few individuals. Hubstaff costs in the range of $5 to $10 per person per month, depending on the plan and your setup. TSheets uses an unusual pricing scale. Teams of between two and 99 people pay $4 per person per month, plus a base fee of $16 per month. So a team of 10 people would pay $56 per month [(10x$4)+$16]. Larger teams of 100 or more pay $4 per person per month plus a base fee of $80 per month. So a team of 100 would pay $480 per month. There is a free one-person account offered as well, and it supports an unlimited number of projects.

Interface and Apps

Learning to use Toggl is a breeze, because it's highly intuitive and simple. At its most basic level, Toggl is just a timer. You launch it, and it starts counting seconds and minutes. When you end a timing session, the total amount of time is saved to your Toggl account. For each session, you log what you're doing, whether it's working for Client X or making headway on Project Y. When it comes time to bill clients or justify your work hours, you have a clear report of what you've done, when, and how long it took.

Within your Toggl account, you can create not only projects and clients, but also teams, workspaces, and tags. All these classification tools help you track time in an orderly fashion.

I used the web app for setting up, which I recommend, although Toggl does have an assortment of desktop apps (macOS, Windows, Linux), mobile apps (Android, iOS), and browser extensions.

You can do everything in the web app, whereas some of the other apps have specific use cases. For example, the desktop apps are useful for collecting data when you're offline, and they'll sync the information they gather to your account once you reconnect. But the desktop apps don't have tools for running reports.

The apps and syncing work impressively well. When I launched the macOS app for the first time, for example, I already had a timer running in the web app. No matter. The moment I logged into the Mac app, Toggl noticed I was already tracking time and synced the desktop app so that it was mirroring the web app.

The desktop apps do have some slight advantages over the web apps, such as noticing idle time and giving you options for how to record it.

The setup experience with Toggl is completely different from that of Harvest. Toggl ushers you along quickly so that you get back to work right away and start tracking your time immediately. Harvest's setup is more leisurely.

In setting up an account with Harvest, I watched a video about the app, spent ten minutes customizing my projects and adding the specific tasks I might bill for (graphic design, editing, and so forth), and customizing two invoice templates, one for a standard invoice and one for a retainer payment. Harvest's setup process is fine, but it definitely sends the message that you will be spending a decent amount of your time working in Harvest generating reports, customizing invoices, and so forth. Toggl instead gives the impression that it will work quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Should you want to do anything else with the service, you certainly can, but Toggl isn't going to twist your arm.

Features

Toggl keeps a laser sharp focus on tracking time. When you use Toggl's timer, it displays time spent on task to the second. A setting for rounding up or down is optional, and you choose the range (not included in the free account).

As mentioned, Toggl has apps for all the major desktop and mobile OSes, plus a browser extension. The Chrome extension goes above and beyond the call of duty. It includes a Pomodoro Technique timer, for people who use that time-management method while they work. It also installs a Start Timer button on productivity-related websites, such as Google Docs. You get to choose which sites are included.

Toggl lets you create different Workspaces and Teams to organize your work. As you track time and classify it to your various projects, tasks, and clients, you can also add tags to time entries, although you can't add a detailed description beyond the task name itself, which you can do in Harvest.

For project-based work, Toggl lets you create subprojects so that you keep track of more than one phase of a project, or different aspects of it, such as separating researching from content creation. Toggl also lets you estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the project, and you can set an alert to let you know when the project is at, say, 80 percent of its expected completion. These features are for paid plans only.

Team-management features, such as being able to edit someone else's time logs, are mostly reserved for paying members, though free account holders can invite collaborators and track time logged across multiple people. Enterprise customers can create a custom field and require team members to complete it for each timed session. As an example, the custom field might ask, "Did you find any new bugs?" or "Is this task now complete?" Premium members can choose this feature as their add-on, but it doesn't come standard with the plan.

Toggl is sharply focused on helping you and your team record time spent on tasks. But not all small businesses and freelancers think about time the same way. While some workers need to log hours as they work them and multiply them by an hourly rate, which Toggl can do, other workers think about time in the reverse: "What is the flat fee I will earn for this project, and based on that number, how many hours can I spend on it to make a reasonable hourly rate?"

For those types of calculations, Harvest is much better, because it includes tools for doing the math. You can break down projects in all kinds of ways to figure out how much time you can afford to spend on a task. Toggl doesn't have anything like that.

Additionally, Toggl is not the sort of time-keeping device that doubles as a virtual punch-clock. There are no features for clocking in and out. It's not designed for planning or managing work, so it doesn't give you an option to schedule work times in advance. You don't use it to track each team member's workload, or monitor their GPS position, or record what they do on their computers. TSheets and Hubstaff have some of these features, but Toggl does not.

Integrations

If you need to integrate a business app with Toggl, chances are you can do it with ease. Toggl supports a long list of productivity apps and other tools used by freelancers and small businesses, such as Asana, Bugzilla, Freshdesk, GitHub, Google Drive, Jira, LiquidPlanner, Quickbooks, Slack, Trello, Wrike, Zendesk, and many others. The list is long. It also offers an API so that organizations with the programming know-how can create whatever integrations they need.

Additionally, Toggl is supported by Zapier, an online platform that assists people in creating automations and integrations among apps. Importantly, you don't need to know how to write code to use Zapier, which is a self-service tool. An example of an automation you can create using Zapier is to automatically have Toggl start recording time whenever a Google Calendar event starts.

Because integrations with Toggl are so well supported, it's a good choice of a tool for nimble and flexible teams that are quick to adopt the technologies they need and ditch the ones that aren't working.

Solidly Focused on Time Tracking

Toggl handles time tracking exceptionally well. It's incredibly intuitive to use with apps for all major platforms. Additionally, Toggl works with a wide variety of other apps and services, and integrating with them is simple. It's an appealing time tracker for individuals and businesses that need only a time-tracking app and nothing more. Toggl's free tier of service is the Editors' Choice for free time-tracking apps for freelancers.

Harvest is the Editors' Choice for paid services because, even though it costs a little more than Toggl's $10-per-month option, it also gives you a lot more, namely invoicing tools and more billing options.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio